someone else's atrocious stories
by Nokomiss
Summary: Power, Filch thinks, and despairs.


someone else's atrocious stories

Notes: Thanks to my lovely beta Rainpuddle. Written for the Squib Secrets Filch-a-thon for Sioniann

* * *

Filch stalks slowly down the hall, feeling the ache deep in his aging bones with every clodding step on hard stone floor. He ignores the dust crowding the corners and crevices, ignores the sobbing girl crouched in a doorway and keeps steadily on his way.

Hogwarts has not been safe for months, since the sorrowful day Dumbledore had fallen, and the last visage of safety in the Wizarding world with him. Filch knows it, and the people crowded within the walls knows it, but no one except him is quite willing to accept the fact. They weren't safe.

He pulls the ring of keys from his pocket. Old and heavy, the keys have been his constant companion over his years as caretaker, staying with him as a comforting weight in his pocket even when Mrs. Norris prowled away from him and the loathing eyes of the students were nowhere to be found. Mrs. Norris would hiss at the students, sending the younger and more pliable running in the opposite direction. He pushes the thought of his feline companion out of his mind; it will do no good to linger on thoughts of happier times now.

Some of the keys are little more than rust anymore, while a couple are shiny new brass. He picks out a brass one, unmarred by time, and carefully climbs a short flight of stairs to a newly hewn door barred with a spelled un-penetrable lock.

He steps inside, locks the door behind him and slumps in an old chair with cushions mended countless times and tearing anew. He casts a suspicious eye around his chamber - the main room, with a chair, wireless radio and shelf of books in one side, a bed, not one of the elaborate monstrosities found in the dormitories but a simple, four post bed covered in a faded quilt. A kerosene lamp on the bedside table, a landscape painting of rolling green hills and rocky precipices adorning the wall, and a tattered leather suitcase, straps firmly shut, pushed under the bed were the only other items in the room.

The new door stands guard, sectioning his space away from the rest of the castle. Another door, old and scarred from ages of abuse, partitions off the lavatory, a simple, utilitarian space.

"They don't understand," grumbles Filch as he slumps into his chair, joints flaming with pain and bones creaking. He pulls a book from the stack on his bookshelf, and begins to carefully scrawl in the latest addition. "But they will."

* * *

A long scream echoes through the corridor.

People jerk out of their own troubled thoughts, relieved from their own suffering by the resounding sound of another's terror.

A tiny girl, no older than twelve, rushes into the room, sobbing and babbling. "Marissa... She... Gone... Blood..."

Filch remembers a girl who blushed rose petal pink.

"It's alright, child," Minerva says, standing and moving to comfort the girl.

Filch sighs and rises without being commanded, wobbling on pain-wracked knees before straightening and shuffling out of the hall to fetch his mop.

* * *

He was scrubbing blood from the castle's courtyard when Minerva approached.

"How many is this?" she asks, voice quiet. Her face is haggard, with heavy circles under her haunted eyes. Leadership is a hard mantle to wear, but even more so when order was collapsing all around them, leaving the aging witch as the lone voice of reason in a seething sea of chaos.

"Third one to jump," Filch says, digging a slender white shard out from between stones. He tosses in the bucket of pink water. "One went into the lake, another two cut their wrists. Four hangings, though."

A spark of the old Minerva emerges as anger flashes in her eyes. "Don't sound so gleeful, Argus. These are innocents, broken and despairing..."

"And the ones to hang themselves are courteous to boot. No mess to clean up, just slice the rope and let 'em fall," Filch agrees, knowing Minerva will expect his complaints. "It's the ones with a dramatic death-wish I hate."

He sloshes more water on the fading stain, and bends over to scrub, the endless motion sending waves of pain through his decrepit body. It is almost enough to make him wish he was simply a stain, rather than charged with the never ending task of cleansing the castle of the remains of the forgotten.

The stains, ghoulish blends of vibrant red and decaying brown, were always the same, no matter who they had once been part of.

He fancies for a moment he smells the scent of flowers, but it's gone under the fading copper smell of death.

If he were to jump, the blood thumping through his temples and the bones aching in his legs would splash and shatter and leave the exact same pattern on the same old stones. He looks up, locating his own window in the confusing maze of walls, and wonders who would wash the stones clean of his flesh and bone.

* * *

Sometimes Filch could barely remember the castle was once a school.

Freshly scrubbed children no longer run playfully down the halls, leaving trails of filth and destruction behind. There are no more practical jokes being played in the halls or the classrooms, which stand devoid of lectures and knowledge. Now, widows and mothers herd tiny children through the halls, young men spend hours rebuilding the walls that had crumbled in the last attack, and the elderly sit in the Great Hall and reminisce.

The walls are filled with the leftovers of Wizarding Britain, the ones incapable and unwilling and too useless to join the fight against You-Know-Who and his army of vengeful Death Eaters.

Filch continues his duties as though nothing has changed, even though everything has. He knows a losing battle when he sees one. The sea of terrified faces filling Hogwarts are no different than the creeping rust stains on the suits of armor in the least traversed corridors. It will grow and expand until there was nothing left but decay, and the once-strong defenses will crumble under the strain.

He simply has to allow it to happen.

* * *

Now and again, he catches a glimpse of the boy savior.

Cocky and brash, the boy has the world at his feet and knows it. Filch glares when he can, moving slowly through the halls and allowing Mrs. Norris to hiss at the brave ones. The boy savior never spares him a glance, though his companions might.

Filch considers it apt that children, with sunshine still in their hair and starlight blinding their eyes, are representing the school.

The innocent will only falter when they saw the cruelty their opponents are willing to unleash. The attack, the one with the man-wolf and the death of Hogwarts' last protector, had only been the slightest sampling of the blood-soaked meal they were to be served.

They wouldn't keep their sunshine and starlight much longer.

* * *

Filch is startled by the sight of an old woman's corpse lying across the table.

She had died in the Great Hall, sitting on a bench at the table that had once belonged to lions and kings. Her face, traced with the lines and spots of time, lays slack, and a dried pool of spittle crusts the corner of her thin-lipped mouth. She isn't wearing shoes, he notices, and one gnarled toe with an long, yellow toenail jutts out of a hole in her stocking.

He steps forward to slide her onto the floor, so that he can scrub the table before breakfast. She must have died sometime in the night, though of old age or sorrowful heart, he can't tell.

He manages to work his hands under her fleshy arms, heaving and feeling the dead woman's weight in his abused joints. Her head shifts as he pulled her towards the floor, and he thinks that it's odd that he doesn't recognize her. So many months cooped together in the castle has made the masses familiar to him, the way students would become familiar to him, only he can't recall this woman.

He stumbles as he takes more of her weight into his arms, and is shocked to feel her rigid limbs go limp. He can no longer control the unwieldy body, so he lets it go and it lands on the floor with a hollow _i thump /i _.

It is then that her head turns, and her cataract-blind eyes open.

"No," Filch says, shaking his head. "Not yet, they didn't warn me."

The dead woman remains silent and stands, wobbling before remembering how to balance.

Filch backs away, then hurries out of the room, hearing the creak and groan of his own decrepit body and praying that the Inferi does not choose to chase after him.

He catches glimpses of murder and resurrection as he goes towards his room, towards his heavy door and spell-enforced lock. This wasn't the way it was planned, he thinks, he was supposed to have been ready.

Down the second corridor he sees a dead man futilely protecting a small dead child in his arms. They are still for now, but Filch knows that soon they will be walking the halls, adding to the chaos.

Little dead girls with blood in their hair, skipping and gleefully shouting, brush past him.

The Death Eaters have created an army of the defeated, Filch knows, shuffling ever-faster down the corridor. The protected ones, the useless ones, they've all become part of the battle to destroy the Order's fragile plans.

A boy with an oddly tilted head and a necklace of bruises is walking towards him, and Filch tries to turn down an empty corridor. He remembers wrapping a rope around that young neck, yes, and the boy remembers cracking open drugged eyes and seeing the old caretaker.

Just another in a list of names.

Filch had thought himself clever, sending the Dark Lord the list of names, showing the Dark Lord his devotion to the plan.

What was once a girl drags herself towards him from the other side of the hall. She no longer has a face, and the limbs still attached to her oddly flat body twitch and jerk as they pull her across the floor.

Filch remembers her snootily informing him, "This isn't a school any longer, squib. You can't give me detention for being out after dark." He remembers her dark hair fluttering around her face like a Thestral's wings, and he remembers the softness of her arms as he grabbed them and forced her to lean over the side of the Astronomy tower.

He can't remember what he said to her, only the rasp of the words in his throat and her cloying flowery scent and the sudden empty feeling as he watched her plummet over the edge.

His arthritic hand had shook when he'd added her name to the book.

Just another scribble on an ever-growing list.

The Dark Lord had been so proud.

Power, he'd promised. I'll give you power.

"Squib," the girl whispered in his mind.

Now, a girl with ribbons of algae streaming from her hair sobs, "You killed me!"

Filch tries not to remember her choking sobs as he forced her underwater.

He'd stayed out of the fight as long as possible, he wants to explain. He wants to tell them about Dumbledore's mercy and the Ministry's offers and the long hours of service. But he knows all they would see was his final desperate attempt to be more than a caretaker wasting his life cleaning after the ungrateful and the apathetic.

Power, he thinks, and despairs.

The other corpses seem unable to speak, but Filch knows what they are thinking. He tries to run, back to his quiet little room and his book of names, but more bodies block the way.

He turns, joints screaming as he moves with more agility than he has in years, but his worn shoe slips on a freshly waxed spot of the floor (his back still aches from the effort it took) and he falls hard.

The world is black for a second, and he can't pull in breath, and he thinks this is what it's like to be dead.

Then colors and light shine in full relief, again, as his sight is restored to see dead children and dead mothers and dead grandfathers moving ever closer.

Filch screams.


End file.
